By Washington PostDaniel Williams
President Trump dropped a sectarian bombshell on Friday into his quick and confused order to curb refugee and immigration flows. He told the Christian Broadcasting Network that “if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible” to enter the United States as a refugee from Syria, adding that “we are going to help them.” The order mandated preferences for minority-religion members in future immigration, which suggests that Christians could be privileged.
Never mind that Trump’s current executive order bans all refugees
from Syria, including Christians, indefinitely. Over the weekend, two
Christian immigrant families were turned away from Philadelphia’s
airport and flown back to the Middle East.
What’s worse is that Trump’s new refugee policy uses the Middle
East’s embattled Christians as props. It is less a show of concern for
Christians than a shot at his predecessor, Barack Obama. Less than one
percent of the 12,600 Syrian refugees admitted by the Obama
administration last year were Christian, though Christians make up about
a tenth of Syria’s population.
Trump could fix that imbalance simply by saying that he will seek out
Christian Syrians along with their Muslim co-nationalists, who both are
trying to flee the country’s civil war. But that’s not what Trump is
trying to do. Instead, he is using Christians to show that he cares more
about them than Obama did, presumably to please some of his American
Christian supporters, and to show that he cares about them more than he
does Syrian Muslims, whom he has tarred as harboring a nest of “radical
Islamic terrorists.” (That many Muslims oppose both the radicals and the
government of Bashar al-Assad, which has killed many more Syrians, goes
unnoticed by Trump.)
Trump’s exclusionary acrobatics do neither Christians in Syria, nor
other victims of persecution elsewhere, any good. U.S. and international
laws regarding refugees are not privileged but inclusive. They apply to
all: Muslim, Christian, Jew, Allawi, Druze, Baha’i — any group that
shows itself to be persecuted.
If Trump wanted to do something in particular for Christians that
would nonetheless comply with U.S. and international refugee law, he
would have done better to focus on Iraq, where in 2014 the Islamic State
expelled tens of thousands of Christians, along with the Iraqi Yazidi
minority, from Mosul and surrounding Nineveh Province. It is clear from
that event that both groups have a “well-founded fear of persecution” if
they return home, language used in U.S. immigration law as a condition
for being granted political asylum.
Even though Mosul’s re-conquest by the Iraqi government is supposed
to happen within a few months, the Yazidis and Christians face a
dilemma: Will it really be safe to go home? I have found, in talks with
refugees in Irbil, Kurdistan, that they don’t think so. In part, that is
because the Mosul experience was not an isolated incident but a
continuation of more than a decade of persecution after the U.S.-led
ouster of Saddam Hussein. In that time, the Christian population has
shrunk from around 1.4 million to 350,000 because of unrelenting pogroms
by both Sunni Muslim rebels and Shiite militias. The government has
done next to nothing to protect beleaguered minorities.
Christians, along with Yazidis, should be given a choice of staying
in Iraq or going into exile abroad. Muslims ought not to object to this
granting of refugee status to Iraqi Christians and Yazidis; the same
international “well-founded fear” standard would cover Muslims in
similar situations.
At the same time, Trump could expand on his so-far sketchy ideas of
doing something about the millions of Syrian refugees of all sects in
the region.
But Trump is not speaking the language of international or even U.S.
refugee standards or actually helping to ease the plight of refugees. He
is simply grandstanding and using Christians as an extra in his
bombastic movie.
Daniel Williams is author of “Forsaken: The Persecution of Christians in Today’s Middle East.”